


tell me which way i ought to go from here

by Tariel_H



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Everything is suffering, F/M, I'm Bad At Tagging, Mild Sexual Content, Mutual Pining, michael and ash talking through their feelings like Adults
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 02:25:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12695202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tariel_H/pseuds/Tariel_H
Summary: there isn’t a word in vulcan for the soft ache in her chest that blooms when he touches her.





	tell me which way i ought to go from here

 

**…**

 

( look at them: how so closely they stand together, like everything that hurts and can’t be seen.  
  
the thing about them; how they try and save everyone, when really, they should start with themselves. )

…

 

all her life,the world has asked something of michael burnham. she would’ve carved points in her ears, transfused all the red blood from her body to make it green—but she can’t. one, the other, or both? it was never a question: she is ten when she hold her human heart in her hands, and eats it raw.

.

.

.

(it is never enough).

 

and thus, all her life, michael burnham has stalked a little apart from her fellows, just as she notices, the lieutenant tyler walks a little apart from his. (indeed, the frequency with which she notices him increases each day. an accumulation of her unabashed desire—perhaps). 

 

and yet, lieutenant taylor, (“please, just ash is fine you know”, he tries to get her to say, one day, and when she says, coolly, “to call you otherwise could be misconstrued as favoritism”, he just laughs) closes the distance with his ease. he can sway between this world and that, he knows when, and how to be gracious, when to be kind, when to smile and laugh—all the million little human queues Amanda could never teach her, not that she didn’t try.

 she’d be jealous, in a different world, but the fact of the matter is this is nothing new—all her life, suspended between what she is, what she could be, what she _should_ be. what is more puzzling, about her current circumstance is the fact that, on more than one occasion, Michael finds herself, confide in him, the turbulence of her mind. 

“isn’t lonely?” he asks her, not in pity, or sympathy, but understanding. they sit in his apartment, sometimes. spacious, cool away from prying eyes. sometimes, they run, but some of the crew give way to their baser needs and jeer at her, which bothers Michael not irks the lieutenant tyler to no end.

 (“why should it matter to you, what they think of me?” she’d asked him once. he’d just shrugged in response, as humans are wont to do when poised with a question they are unsure of how to answer. “you’re one of us, that’s why. _ohana_.”

“excuse me?” her brow quirks.

“never mind,” he says, laughing, and sprints ahead).

so tonight, they play three-dimensional chess, fingers hovering in the air as they move the pieces, and because they are adults, pretend as if they are each not watching the other when they think the other isn’t looking.

“I’ve lived my whole life like this. how could it be? To be—quantified and known as an other, to know your place in the hierarchy, that is easy. but living as I am now,” her voice goes flat, “is hard. harder than anything I’ve had to accomplish in my life. I suddenly find myself not knowing how to act, how to be. I did, for a while—” and when she trails off, the tips of his fingers reach across the board, find her knuckles.

she jerks back, with a flinch in her eye, hates that his mouth tightens, hates that all she ever feels like she makes him look is sad. there are things she can’t talk about. not ever. she could release the ghosts in her throat, but all they would do is haunt her. he has been through so much, already. it would be selfish to unburden herself.

“you can tell me things, if you want.” he says, gently, like he can read her mind, but it’s not telepathy, just awareness, of how her brow creases, how her mouth quirks. “really. it’s okay, to lean on others. being human—it’s just a thing you are, michael. there aren’t rules these hard, defined rules. we’re all just playing it by ear. so, take it easy on yourself, okay?.” he doesn’t reach out to touch her again. michael surprises herself by wishing that he would, but the warmth of his smile radiates from his chest all the same.

 

“it should be easy. for seven years, I was aboard a human crew, I was first officer. I led them, I knew them. I would’ve done—I did everything, for them. so why isn’t it easier?”

“seven years isn’t going to make up for a lifetime. that’s okay, too.” he is so, so, gentle with her, in the way he wishes she would be with herself.  
  
“seven years, and all I did was get them killed.” she is bewildered, how she offers herself so willing to him.

“no—” he says, suddenly stern, in the voice she imagined he’d use to command a platoon of troops, in a voice that brooks no argument, “Michael, there are things out of your control, factors even your Vulcan intellect couldn’t account for. And if it means anything,” he pauses, “i understand why you did what you did.”

“it does,” she says ,a while later, only after her queen takes his king (predictable, really: ash smiles to himself, what other outcome could there possibly be), “mean something. you—” she blinks, four times in rapid succession, “you mean something. I appreciate all that you have done, and continue to do for me,” she looks up at him, under the fan of her lashes, so soft (and yet, her grip firm on his heart). “I just need time.”

“take all that you need. I’ll be waiting.”

“for how long?” the others don’t know her like he does. anyone else wouldn’t read how her cadence dips, low and unsure. her small hand reaches out, and he meets her in the middle, the tips of her left hand meeting his right, warmth, pooling between their palms.

his shoulders tug up in a shrug, and she marvels again, at how easy this all is for him. their fingers slip, intertwine. “however long it takes.”

…

 

she isn’t here, sometimes. he can tell, by the hollowed shine in her eyes, dark as stars they are.

this war means they’ve stopped being here in the world, they’re in a different place a place where human life has no meaning, the bonds they make, break.

 she exists as the stars; in her stillness, her immensity. (in how achingly alone she can be).

 

…

( in his dreams: he is engulfed in smoke, ash, fire. in his dreams, there is a Klingon arrow jammed into his heart, and he tries to pull it out but drops of blood run down the shaft and stain his hand and instead he suffocates in a haze of his own blood. in his dreams, his mother is there, burning alive as the comet strikes. even now, her voice echoes over the crackle of the flames “map out your place in the star, my _baita,_ my little boy, I love you—”  
  
in his dreams, michael is with him on the shores of the lake, and she is singing. the Vulcan words reflect back off the lake in the crisp air, clear as glass. he feeds her flakes of hot tuna from his fingers, her head in his lap, and she tells him of the desert on Vulcan, he, of the rolling fog of Seattle.

“ _t'hy'la_ ,” she says, sometimes, touching the soft lids of his eyes, hands grazing down the rough stubble of his beard to hold his face. he catches her stuttering palm in his own, lips grazing each of the tips of her fingers, and she says, again “ _t'hy'la_.”

in his dreams, they kiss languidly, as the dying sun sets behind them, as if they have all the time in the world.

he’s never cared about a happy ending. but in his dreams, they have one).  

ash wakes, and heads out, to clear his mind of the daze of violence, on the one hand, juxtaposed against the tenderness of want, on the other. michael is already there, running. the light refracts the haunted look in her eye, shadows like bruises hanging underneath. they fall into place, and run, side by side in silence until the dawn lights on the ship break.

 …

 

he doesn’t sleep.

 michael learns that, one night, when she can’t either. (at first, there are security codes governing when she can leave her quarters, but disabling them is as easy as breathing. she’s hacked through worse than this as a child, hewing her way into the federation’s redacted files on her parents, so she can watch them die over and over and over. there’s no hate in her heart, only emptiness, and Michael can’t decide what’s worse.

“never let your past rule over your present.” is the only thing Sarek says, when he finds her, he next morning, eyes hollowed.) 

 _never let your past rule you present._ her fists collide with the training dummy. “ _number one,”_ philippa calls out, from the fucking grave—sometimes Michael closes her eyes and she’s there, so close she might touch her. it hurts to be human, michael realizes, not some of it, _all_ of it, all of her on fire, all of her gnawing with regret.

 her fists: raised. again, and again, and again. She will beat the rage out of her with her bare hands until her knuckles are bloodied, until she can think straight, until the ghosts _let her be._ she doesn’t hear ash come in. she is barefoot, in her aloneness, the intimacy of it, her harsh breath, her rage and despair, making him flush.

“think that dummy’s taken all it can. spar with me, instead?” michael is already swaying on the backs of her heels, hands raised, mind not at all clear, but it’s easier, to focus on the sound of their breathing, easier to calculate the probability of his movements, her chance of winning (always at sixty percent or higher).

she bests him thrice that night, dumping him neatly on his back, throwing him over her shoulder against the wall, once. he does pin her to the ground, but it’s easy enough to maneuver her legs between his own, propel the weight of his body down to throw her up, ending with the match with her on top of him, elbow to his neck. the both of them breathing hard, his lips parted (and hers too).

  
“we—”, her mouth is so dry, ribs drawn tight in her chest, distracted by his warm breath lingering, how it smolders, heavy as air laden before a storm “should get to bed. to perform optimally for our next mission.”

“yeah.” (michael misses the heat in his voice, too preoccupied as she is with watching the brown pane of his throat as he swallows. she’ll blame that on human instinct, on how she wishes to scrape her teeth at his skin). 

“I’ll see you tomorrow?” her voice is uneven as she pulls back, tasking herself with remembering the flush of his cheek, the bright light in his eye. 

“yeah, you can kick my ass some more.” she doesn't smile but something in her softens as she nods.

 

“I’d like that.”

 ...

“what the _hell_ was that out there, burnham?” being her keeper is, truly, easier _said_ than done.

she, plunging ahead in the wooden forest, thrusting herself between the gun aimed at him and the captain, burnham, in hand to hand combat, burnham down—

“you disobeyed a _direct_ order,”

 

“lieutenant—,” her voice snaps, like a tree branch in half, his rank thrown up as a barb, like a barrier, like she can protect herself from this, “I was completing the mission objective in the most expedient manner open to us.” he hates when it’s like this, her eyes flashing in a most recalcitrant insubordination. (he knows it, and so does: she has nothing, left to lose, and nothing will control her, not Lorca, try as he might, not him—as much as she loves him. she will disobey, transgress, with utter regard for her own safety if it means the rest of them are safe).

things he hates: the grating harshness of his voice, how, in this moment, his hands shake, how he wishes he could hold her between them.

“you were endangering your life—”  
  
“if that’s what it takes—”

“there are people who watch your back—”

“the last time someone tried to help me, they died.” her voice splits at that, and she’s not looking at him, but god, he wishes she would.

 “that doesn’t mean we all will! god, _Michael,_ you aren’t some _fucking_ martyr —” this fight, too loud, too ugly in the hushed corridor (but it is blessedly empty. They are alone, save for all their demons between). 

“I don’t understand—why don’t you understand that your life can be more than just impossible decisions, more than just a tragic end.” Ash hasn’t been this angry in so long, this angry that red bubbles under the surface of his skin when he pinches his eyes shut, fingers clasping the bridge of his nose.

  
“ _because—”_ he doesn’t ever remember her raising her voice like this, everything that was gentle is now shrill, and barbed, old wounds and new flared open to bleed, “have you ever stopped to think that maybe it’s what I deserve.” It is a horrible moment, where they just stand, and breathe, and ache in each other’s direction. but at the look in her eyes, the fight empties from him, the air from his lungs leaking out. his everything hurts for her, this woman, battered by circumstance, by duty, and honour— his arms reaching out, because if something doesn’t tether her down to the earth, she’ll slip away, under the weight of it all.

for a moment, he thinks she’ll walk away, right then and there, but she walks into them instead. (one, or the both of them is trembling).

“easy, michael—”and it’s this. this moment, when he leans down and she reaches up, on her tips of her toes, the moment where they come together and kiss like comets on a collision course, that they’ll remember for the rest of their lives, his hands, tender, brittle, fragile things they are, and she so small in his arms. the way she pools against chest, burning warm, melting like hot wax under the heat of his fucking hands. she’ll remember the smooth curve of his thin brown lips (his beard scratches against her cheek and something like pleasure rising in her belly, in her throat; she’d laugh with equal parts grief and sorrow if her lips weren’t busy with the business of finding her name in the cavern of his throat).

 “some of us need you.” he murmurs, against the crown of her forehead, when they part for breath. “what need could you possibly have of a mutineer, a condemned woman? lieutenant—” he’s kissing her again, slower, this time, fingers on her jaw, her face up to meet him. she’s seen this on holos, but had never thought—never imagined stopped to consider that would burn like this.

never thought she could hunger, like this. “I need you.” inexplicably, inexorably. “Michael—” she turns, hands running over her lips, arms clasped together, voice hoarse.

  
“well— _don’t_.”

“ _michael_ ,” the multitudes in which he expresses her name, like a prayer, like a wish, like want and longing, the way he wants her drives her to shame, to guilt, she is a death sentence to all hose she has known, and she will not condemn him too, bright, beautiful thing that he is, “don’t push me away. you don’t have to be alone, anymore.” his arms, loose on her waist. always giving her the space to flee, if she should so choose. (the problem: she never _wants_ to. the problem: she wants to bury herself the gravelly warmth of his voice).

“it is illogical,” she says,  (convincing no one, not even herself), as his fingers skim the arch of her eyebrow, trip down to her cup her cheek, “to what?” her back is to the wall, chin tilted so her lips grazes the corner of his. 

“to _want_.” his chest trembles. she holds herself so high, his atlas; the world on her shoulders with the weight of all the people and their hearts, and that is her curse: to bear unjustly the role heralding this war to its beginning, and it’s bitter end, too. of the beginning of the war.

_(“it isn’t fair,” he breathes against her neck, their legs, tangled, later. “life, as I found, rarely is.”)._

 ...

she hovers by his door, uncertainty flushing her limbs with awkwardness. “tyler—are you sure? Perhaps this is unwise, perhaps I should,”

“easy, burnham,” he murmurs, low as a hanging tide of thunder, his hands enclosing over her wrist, gently, tugging her forward. Michael leans up, kissing him hard, and he lifts, so her legs wrap around his waist and they fall back.

they strip to their underwear—with difficulty, what with their hands, clinging to each other’s skin, so greedy are they to be acquainted with the warmth and space of another. she doesn’t ask about the scars that twist down, beyond where she can’t see, doesn’t touch them, instead, reaching for his mouth with her own. “is this okay?” he says, positioning himself between her legs, teeth at her throat, her breast. it is all she can do, to nod, and say, _yes._

“is this okay?” he says, again, fingers trailing to her thigh, and she breathes again, _yes._ he says again, _is this okay,_ his tongue pressed against her clit, propping her thighs opening, and Michael cries out—he slides two of his finger in the slickness of her, and she cries out, again, soft, her fingers buried in the birds nest of his hair. (how soft, the backs of her knees). their eyes meet, in the softness of the light, and she comes, like water, like rain, he swallows the lot, and she comes again with a shiver.   

They fall asleep, michael tucked against his back, chin on his shoulder, arm curled over his.

 

it is perfect.

 

except—

he wakes in sweat, thrashing. his gasps are what wake her, but it is her voice that draws him from the edge. he trembles ( perhaps, they both are ), her fingers finding his temple, her voice like a pool of still deep water.

“my mind to your mind,” she says, like she’d heard sarek murmur to amanda, a thousand times over. she’d bruise a thousand Klingons with her bare hands to be able to share his mind, share his thoughts, let him unburden himself into her as she his with him.

 “my thoughts to your thoughts.” (nothing but a gesture, of course, but with her forehead pressed to him, the two of them holding each other so close the edges of them blur, meld into each other—what difference does it make? )

 

…

 

“the lieutenant looks at you with—” spock hesitates, because there’s no word in this language for the look in ash’s eyes when they fall to Michael; spock is young, but his human eyes see. ( standard is a subpar language at best, filled with half meanings and mistruths. they have discussed this at length ).  

 “ _k' tushat.”_  he says, finally; with an air of solemnity, conveyed properly as it is meant; as an ache, as a sorrow. a word, in their language, to partake the heaviness of a grief, unmistakable, of a parting a deep loneliness. “ _tela'at ko-kai—”_ the breathe catches in her throat, hot, so long has it been since he has called her _sister,_ “ is this partnership wise?” (another break, in which spock blinks too quickly, mouth flat as a line as it gets when his emotions battle is logic; her brother is the unlucky, of them, caught in the middle).

“how unlike you, spock”.

“i istaya du rai weht klau do ik if pavesh-tor tor du.” _i wish you no more harm other than that which has already befallen you._ tilly has been teaching her the meaning of comedic timing, and Michael categories this moment as that, exactly, when tyler walks in, eyebrows quirked in a way she likes to think he learned from her. 

Tyler clears his throat, hands drawn up in the traditional ta’al, “ _t'nar pak sorat y'rani_.”  


“what is necessary is never unwise,” she’s not looking at spock, when she says this, but ash. “au lates-tor k' me fi' nash yut _._ ” _he walks alongside me on this path._

…

  “I want to know you Michael, know what you like and don’t like, know that—if I touch you, some way you don’t like, you’ll tell me. I want—” and maybe that’s his problem. He wants it all, all of her. All the parts of her he’ll let him. She is something good, and right, and whole.

The breath escapes her lungs with a whoosh, her face, cool, implacable as ever. (people say things about her, one of which being that she feels nothing. That’s a lie, tyler thinks, they’re just not looking hard enough, at the twitch under her jaw, the smooth tight line of her mouth pressed together. the dampness of her dark eyes. when people look at her, it’s never just michael that looks back, but the person people think she ought to be).

 _Oh,_ he breathes, “Have you ever had the chance to be just yourself?” maybe it’s the wrong thing to say. he counts the number of breathe in-between, where the space his question has ripped open lies still, _one, two, three---_ she is still, for so long, nearly thirty counts of breath. Each word, pushed out slowly, deliberately, (with grief)

“once. and I lost everything because of it.”

“ _michael,_ ” something breaks, then, (ash thinks it’s his heart, breaking for her, breaking for this little girl atlas) his hands, soft on her, she: leaning into him, leaning up to him, and when they kiss, it is a storm breaking over the dawn, as two trees would, their roots entangled as his hands are in the soft curls of her hair. 

“you could have anyone.” it’s not a statement, but fact.  “i don’t know if I can give you want you want.” (the admission, a truth that bites, but she’s never been one to shy away from the things that hurt her).

“I want you.”

“I don’t know how.”

 “that’s okay,” he says, in a murmur, so quiet he may as well not have said anything at all, “it’s alright—” and michael’s not sure who reaches first but the distance between them has closed, her hands hovering over the slope of his cheek and his warm breath cascading over her. ( it is all difficult: but she knows, the real world is never easy; all is able to wound, everything so real it rends them weak).

 She doesn’t realize her grip on him has lessened, until he is standing over her, with the ghost of his first two fingers kissing gently the tips of her own (a gesture she committed once, as they lay in his bed and his breath evened into sleep, when she’d committed to herself the luxury of allowing her fingers, to ghost over his palm, in vain attempts to say all which she cannot in her words). 

“you are enough, as you are.”

 

…

 

(when Michael reaches to touch him for the first time, he trembles. the word _no,_ seems to die on his chest, but Michael does this thing where she looks at him her gaze is flat, reaching into his chest and tug on the strings that unravel him _._ maybe it’s a Vulcan thing. maybe, it doesn’t matter. humans are hard to read for her, but this, this is easy to see—with his eyes like flashing, screaming _trapped_. when it’s like this, she lies next to him, doesn’t touch him, her hand, outstretched, if he should so choose to reach.

he thinks she sleeps, when he curls his hands in hers, tracing the curve of her palm, the slope of the tips of her fingers.

 she isn’t).

 

…  
…

 

time is passing, and this isn’t the life she could be having, but when he is close. it’s all she can do to open her hands, now, brush her scarred knuckles against his own, so they close over. even, as soft as they are with each other, he can’t bring herself to look at her, sometimes.

that’s okay. sometimes he can’t talk, the names of all those who have hurt him hoard in his mouth, in his through, suffocating him even from a million light years away. their past slices at them, as a steel blade clipping from their souls.

she sits with him, quietly, in a corner, or sometimes, strokes the angry lines from his forehead.

nothing lasts forever, not war, not pain, not grief.  
  
it is enough, tucked into each other as they are.

 

(she is enough, finally).

_…_

spock will ask her again, when the war is over, ask of her _telik,_ her bonded. ash’s hand is dry on her own, the smile tucked in her eye.

“is it unwise, to seek such solace in one not of our culture?” spock asks. michael is not looking at him, but at the cradle of ash’s head against the sunlight, the slice of his mouth as he smiles, out to the distance.

her answer, after all these years, remains.

“what is necessary is never unwise.”

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> ash tyler is not a Klingon spy, repeat. find me at empiricallly on tumblr to submit prompts (or cry about these two!!)


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